Casey Seiler: Journo's secret shame!

The day before Thanksgiving, my 78-year-old mother made a one-point landing on her left shoulder while taking a walk with my brother on the charming but slightly raddled sidewalks of his Pennsylvania college town.

After the ordeal of the emergency room and the interrupted holiday, he did the hard work of squiring her back home to Louisville, Ky., and getting many of the systems in place to aid her recovery — chief among them the recliner where she's been sleeping for the past three weeks. I arrived two weeks ago to take the second shift; my sister checks in after Christmas.

As anyone who has provided even temporary care for a parent might attest, the experience is at once a journey back to childhood and into the farthest reaches of being a grown-up person.

In addition to staying plugged in to the newsroom, my time was filled by de-cluttering her house of items such as my college copy of Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France," which I'm just never going to re-read. The real challenge was the basement, which is still pretty much off-limits to my mother due to the precipitous stairs.

And it was there, high on a shelf, that I found a box of papers that ran through college and into the wilderness years of my early 20s. Here was a real time machine, including letters — yes, honest-to-goodness letters in handwriting on lined paper — from friends still here or gone.

And that's where I found my rejection letter from the National Enquirer.

"Thank you for responding to our advertisement for a writer," began the May 1990 missive from the tabloid's "personnel manager" at its offices in beautiful Lantana, Fla. "We have received a tremendous response to our ad and several applicants have qualifications which seem to correspond more directly to our needs." (Please read this sentence again.) "We find, therefore, that we cannot consider you for the current opening.

"Again, thank you for your interest in The NATIONAL ENQUIRER, and we wish you every success in the future."

I was flabbergasted — why in the world had I applied to the National Enquirer in the spring of 1990? At this point, I was almost a year out of college (a school with a prestigious journalism program, though I never availed myself of its curriculum) with editing experience and a solid collection of features clips, followed by a fall internship at a prestigious national magazine in Manhattan.

That sojourn, however, had been followed by four months of skiing and living with my brother in a doublewide mobile home a half-hour west of Aspen, Colo. After that, it was back to Louisville and my old gig doing singing telegrams, which had not been part of the initial career plan.

Now it was all coming back to me: the weekly trips to the main branch of the public library to study the new issue of Editor & Publisher, which in those pre-digital days was the best source for journalism want ads; then crafting the cover letters and tailoring the selection of clips to each potential employer; then standing by the mailbox outside my parents' house hoping for good news.

By May, I must have been getting desperate. For all I know, I might have also applied to other odious publications — stage critic at Swank or politics editor at Leg Show, perhaps — but discarded the rejections. Maybe I thought the Enquirer could be just the sort of lark that would look weird on a resume (but weirder than singing telegrams?) or even serve as fodder for a long insider-tells-all nonfiction piece in a more reputable national outlet.

Last week, of course, was an auspicious one in which to be brought face-to-face with a near-miss career encounter with the National Enquirer, whose parent company was revealed to have assisted President Donald J. Trump in his efforts to conceal the accounts of his alleged mistresses. Federal prosecutors have concluded that those efforts represented clear violations of campaign finance law.

Standing there in my mother's basement among her galaxy of tools and French-language schoolbooks, I imagined an alternate history in which I got the job, moved to Florida, cut my teeth on kidnapped-by-saucer-people and Lobster-Boy-eats-siblings stories before rising through the ranks.

Could I have found myself on the Trump infidelity beat? Is there a moral avenue that ends with me in a room with Stormy Daniels, or federal prosecutors, or both?

And if so, do I at least get to spend Christmas at Mar-A-Lago?

Set against this scenario, two weeks at home with my broken-winged mother did not look so bad.

Casey Seiler is the Times Union's editor. He previously served as managing editor, Capitol Bureau chief and entertainment editor. He is a longtime contributor to WMHT's weekly political roundup "New York Now."

Before arriving in Albany in 2000, Seiler worked at the Burlington Free Press in Vermont and the Jackson Hole Guide in Wyoming.

A graduate of Northwestern University, Seiler is a Buffalo native who grew up in Louisville, Ky. He lives in Albany's lovely Pine Hills.